The most common view is that it is not good to concentrate newspaper ownership in a small group. The reason for this is that these owners would have too much influence. They could have their newspapers all present one point of view. This would mean that the people would not get a variety of points of view and the owners would have too much of an ability to shape people’s opinions.

However, you can argue that concentrating newspaper ownership would actually be good. This is mainly because newspapers are struggling so badly right now. If you concentrated ownership in the hands of a small group, all of the people who owned newspapers would presumably be good at it. They would specialize in owning newspapers and could keep the papers alive where individual owners might not. The ownership group could afford to have more bureaus in foreign countries and around the US. If different papers are owned by various people, they will not be able to afford to keep all these bureaus open. Thus, having the concentrated ownership would allow for better news coverage in each paper.

In today’s world where newspapers are struggling to survive, it might make sense to allow their ownership to be more concentrated than it used to be.